DePaul University

Here’s how we helped DePaul University improve their online presence across departments, channels, teams, and more than 100 websites to meet key business and marketing goals.

DePaul University’s digital footprint spans ten colleges and dozens of departments that manage more than 100 individual websites, a multitude of social media accounts, and significant online advertising.

Our work with their Digital Experience and Analysis team was driven by several important goals.

Mightybytes prioritized continuous improvement focused on key metrics to support the goals above. Multiple small projects with clear parameters moved us closer to desired outcomes that supported larger business and marketing goals over time.

Whenever possible, we tested deliverables with real users to ensure DePaul’s goals were also aligned with those of its users.

To help DePaul’s team align on goals, build capacity, and improve governance, we facilitated numerous strategy and training workshops.

Over several years, we trained multiple teams on various strategies and techniques aligned with the university’s digital marketing goals.

These workshops helped internal DePaul teams across departments coordinate and improve communications toward an end goal of improving KPI performance while decreasing monthly ad spend.

Auditing the core university site for content and SEO performance helped us identify ways to improve content, search rankings, and conversion rates for those pages.

Over months that followed, we developed a consistent reporting methodology to track ongoing recommendations, improvements, and results, then applied this process to websites across DePaul’s online properties.

These efforts improved user experience and page content quality while also helping the DePaul team better understand what target visitors want from the site. Providing ongoing data insights via monthly reports helped them track progress over time.

Finally, to prepare for a potential website redesign, we ran a sustainability audit on the university’s core website. DePaul’s team wanted to set a baseline for impact metrics to consider improving alongside more traditional marketing metrics.

The university website was self-hosted and built on an outdated platform that impeded their ability to meet important performance and marketing objectives. Mightybytes audited the website for key sustainability and performance metrics, providing a detailed report with recommendations to consider prioritizing during the website redesign process.

The website sustainability audit included:

• Emissions estimates: Broad stroke estimates of website emissions over the course of a calendar year
• Competitor Benchmarks: Metrics comparisons against five other regional university websites
• Page Priorities: A list of priority pages with the biggest problems
• Site Priorities: Key insights and prioritized recommendations to improve website performance and efficiency for hosting, page performance, and user experience across pages.
• Capacity-Building: Training recommendations to get their team up to speed on web sustainability practices.

With this report, the university not only has a clear roadmap for prioritizing sustainability as part of its overall digital strategy, but also put in place significant performance improvements on its current platform.

Our work with DePaul resulted in continuous small wins, each of which moved the university closer to its ultimate goal of providing a better user experience for current, past, and potential students while also improving page conversions.

Throughout the relationship, we continually explored new strategies for refining DePaul University’s digital marketing efforts in a productive and mutually beneficial partnership.